Jacobin Magazine: “When Thomas Paine passed away at his small farm in New Rochelle, New York in 1809, he was impoverished and largely reviled.
In the United States, then undergoing a dramatic religious revival, he was slandered as an “infidel” and a “drunk” for his attacks on Christianity and his rumored personal moral depravity. This, on top of his tirades against George Washington, the Federalists, and slavery, had decimated his reputation in the country he helped found.
Across the Atlantic, Paine was condemned as a traitor to the Crown and a dangerous rabble-rouser for his passionate defense of the French Revolution in Rights of Man, convicted in absentia for seditious libel, and burned in effigy throughout Britain. No single person was seen as a greater threat to the political establishments of his day than Paine, both in the monarchies of Europe and in his own American Republic.
As a cult of personality around the “Founding Fathers” grew over the course of US history, the author of Common Sense was notably excluded. For about two hundred years, Paine’s image in mainstream American circles was utterly tarnished: Teddy Roosevelt’s view of him as a “filthy little atheist” sums up the prevailing sentiment. It’s no surprise that decades earlier Abraham Lincoln kept his admiration of Paine quiet.
Nonetheless, interest in Paine spiked during periods of crisis and democratic upheaval in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, and things changed when Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 acceptance speech for the Republican Party’s nomination for president, quoted the great revolutionary’s inspiring promise, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Since then, Paine has been readmitted into the lineup of US founders, and has recently been made the unlikely poster boy of the reactionary right, most notably by media personality Glenn Beck.https://2050a74fdea429caa045c0ebb15f8257.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Unlikely, because Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution.”